Monday, March 19, 2012

How To Destroy Something Beautiful

"First, you will meet someone amazing — probably better than amazing. This person will fulfill and exceed all your expectations. Whatever it is you’ve been looking for all this time, this person will exemplify that, and you’ll begin falling for them in every conceivable way.

At the start you’ll be happy. You’ll want to scream about it and wear a t-shirt that says “I’m with awesome” that has an arrow pointing to them so everyone will know that you’re one of the lucky ones. You’ll laugh together and hold hands and it will be like your very own personal romantic comedy.

Then something will click inside your brain. You’ll start worrying all the time. You’ll worry that you’re not good enough for your new relationship. You’ll worry you’ll be dropped in exchange for someone better. You’ll worry your heart is about to be broken. You’ll worry it’s all a big fat joke designed to rain even more crap on you, because really, you’ve never been lucky in love. You’ll worry about all manner of inanities and not one of them will come close to making even a tiny bit of sense. But you’ll worry regardless.

So you start acting on your irrational worries. You start putting yourself down. You feel sub-par, like you don’t deserve this wonderful person being wonderful to you all the time. You regress. You become your most vile, juvenile, selfish image. You push and you prod and spout immaturities in a desperate bid to push the other person away. One day, you’ll push so hard you’ll succeed.

You’ll cry because you didn’t want to ruin everything, not really. You don’t know why you acted the way you did, not when everything was so perfect. You wanted it to work out — it was going to be a fairytale. You’ll hate yourself and your childish ways. Maybe you’ve never behaved this way before; maybe you have, but not since you were fifteen.

You’re scared, that’s why you’re being a moron, but it’s not an excuse — just an explanation, and not a particularly good one either. You replay all the crappy things you said and did. The whole thing is an out of body experience — you scream at yourself to stop being an asshole. What you really want is a time machine, so you can erase all your manic behavior and start from the beginning, throwing your arms around the one you’ll someday love with confidence and abandon."